Charitable Incorporated Organisations (Insolvency and Dissolution) (Amendment) (No.2) Regulations 2020

Baroness Scott of Needham Market Excerpts

Friday 9th October 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Scott of Needham Market (LD) [V]]

My Lords, it is fascinating how a debate on a modest SI on a Friday afternoon is throwing up such interesting and potentially far-reaching issues. I declare an interest as a trustee of two charities: the Industry and Parliament Trust and Community Action Suffolk. I absolutely associate myself with the remarks of the Minister about the role that charities play in public life generally and during the difficult pandemic period. I also back up the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, on how difficult many charities and voluntary organisations are finding things.

I will confine my remarks to points raised by the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments, of which I am a member. As the Minister outlined in her full introduction, the predecessor SI had something of a chequered history in its drafting and procedure. These regulations modify the initial regulations laid on 6 July, which, as we have heard, contained a number of errors which were picked up by the JCSI. The Minister has assured us that no stakeholders have been negatively impacted by these problems, but I respectfully note that that is rather beside the point—had they been badly impacted, it would have been worse in some ways, but this shows how much better it is to get it right first time.

The JCSI picked up the question of communications between the DWP and DCMS, which clearly fell down here. The Minister has been very open about that and we welcome her reassurance that they will try to do better going forward. What she has not referred to, and which is very serious in my view and that of the committee, is the requirement to notify both Speakers when a regulation comes into force before it is laid before Parliament. The Speakers should be notified immediately, and in this case they were not; the notification arrived 13 days later. Having asked for an explanation, we have not seen a satisfactory reason why this delay took place. This is very serious.

I am not picking on the Bill team here. There is clearly is quite a problem across the Civil Service. The Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee report of 1 October highlights that, so far in this Session, 8.5% of instruments have had to be replaced or corrected. It regards 5% as the absolute maximum to which that should apply.

In recent weeks, both Houses have spent a lot of time debating and thinking about a meaningful role for Parliament in the scrutiny and agreeing of secondary legislation, but I would also argue that proper drafting is an important part of this that we must not neglect. That legal certainty is important.

In my 20 years in the House, I have seen an increased tendency for legislation to rely for important detail on swathes of delegated powers that come forward, sometimes many years later, in the form of regulations and secondary instruments. When you add that trend to the immediate challenges of legislation related to both Brexit and Covid, the Civil Service is having to draft SIs at a pace that could never have been foreseen. Nevertheless, we must get it right.

I will finish with a quick remark about the role of the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments. The legal advisers available to work with the committee are absolutely superb; I see this every week in my working life. It is fair to say that, although they are not exactly the friends of the department—it is important that they maintain independence on Parliament’s behalf to ensure a split between the Executive and Parliament—they are not the enemies of the department either. They just see themselves as complementary and are always happy to work with departments that have any doubts about procedure. If departments could see them more as a kind of critical friend, it might save us having to come back and revisit the 8.5% of SIs that we have heard about.

Covid-19: Museums, Galleries and Historic Buildings

Baroness Scott of Needham Market Excerpts

Thursday 21st May 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Scott of Needham Market (LD)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a non-executive board member of the National Archives. While the National Archives has closed its building, given the importance of its function, I wanted to reassure noble Lords that it remains highly active in very important ways.

For the duration of its closure, it is providing free online access to its wide range of digitised records. Through legislation.gov.uk, it is aiding legal certainty through the rapid publication of emergency legislation, operating a seven-day-a-week service. It is capturing the comprehensive record of the Government’s evolving response to Covid-19 by archiving key government websites and social media channels.

Given its role as leader of the wider archive sector, I close with a plea to consider the impact of this crisis on archives more widely. Its economic impact puts at risk the survival of the irreplaceable archives maintained by businesses, charities and local authorities.

Charitable and Voluntary Sector

Baroness Scott of Needham Market Excerpts

Thursday 30th April 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Scott of Needham Market (LD)]

We live in an age where we have an obsession with numbers—that is, analysing and counting—but we occasionally forget what really matters: the outcomes. As inspiring as it was to see 750,000 volunteers come forward for the NHS, the fact is that many of them have been given no tasks to perform. In the meantime, 1.5 million of our most vulnerable shielded citizens have not been receiving the support that they were promised.

Volunteers need to be organised as well as mobilised, and that requires structure. It makes no sense to create large new centralised systems when existing local provision is already there. It may look fragmented at the local level, but it is much more likely to be effective than any other way when properly organised. Local providers are much more likely to be trusted, to be aware of local needs and conditions and, crucially, to be able to draw on resources quickly when they are needed. For those needing specialist help, it is much more likely to be at hand in a local network.

In Suffolk, we formed the collaborative communities board, made up of a range of statutory providers and the VCSE sector—including Community Action Suffolk, of which I am a trustee. Town and parish councils are also represented; they are an important link into many communities, especially in rural areas. We have 1,500 community groups registered on our app. The Home But Not Alone helpline is taking around 1,300 calls a week and is organising help for people in need, including food packages, medicines, transport and befriending. A 24/7 mental health hotline was opened on 15 April. Providing accommodation solutions is a major strand of work for all these organisations, which are working together to provide accommodation and the support that people need.

I urge the Government not to neglect the local dimension in all this.

Armistice Day: Centenary

Baroness Scott of Needham Market Excerpts

Monday 5th November 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Scott of Needham Market (LD)]

On 1 March 1918, a 50 year-old master mariner named John Jones died at sea while serving as first mate on HMS “Penvearn”. A member of the Royal Naval Reserve, he had sailed the Atlantic convoy right through the First World War. I know about John Jones because he was my great-grandfather, but what little I knew as I was growing I learned from my grandmother. He had gone to sea as boy, progressed quickly through the ranks and ultimately went down with his ship. I know a lot more about him now. He did indeed go to sea as a boy; his first voyage was on a ship named the “Quarryman”. He became a second mate at age 24 and married the following year. He achieved his master’s certificate at the age of 35 and a lot more besides. And I know that, on 1 March 1918, his ship was torpedoed by U-boat “105”, 15 miles north-west of South Stack head, Holyhead.

At the same time, a few hundred miles away in Bradford, William Thomas Riley had been demobbed after being injured in the trenches. What I knew about this great-grandfather I learned from my father because, unlike John Jones, William Riley lived to a ripe old age—long enough to send a card noting and congratulating the birth of his first great-grandchild Rosalind, which I still have. I knew only that he had gone to war, came back and then never spoke of what had happened to him. I also knew that, for the rest of his life, his behaviour could be erratic. My father said, in characteristic understated Yorkshire style, “He was a rum lad, my grandad”.

I found out many years after my father’s death that Private William Thomas Riley was a labourer. He was five feet five, had hazel eyes and brown hair, and weighed 130 pounds, so small and probably under- nourished, like so many working-class men of that generation. He enlisted on 2 September 1914, no doubt inspired by Kitchener’s call five days earlier for a battalion of pals to fight shoulder to shoulder for the honour of Britain.

I learned that on 30 December 1914 he was buried in a trench collapse, when he was somewhere near Armentières. After being rescued, his physical injuries were treated, but he was never again whole. Of course, we would now recognise that this rum lad had in fact spent the rest of his life suffering from post-traumatic stress, as did so many of that generation. The men who left Bradford, accompanied by marching bands and cheered on by tens of thousands of people, came quietly home to families grieving for the men who they once knew.

I wanted to use today’s debate to celebrate and honour brave men such as John Jones and William Thomas Riley, but also to recognise and celebrate the individuals and organisations, many of them voluntary, which since then have painstakingly preserved, interpreted and made accessible so much of the public record. They have enabled many thousands of people like me to learn more than they could ever have believed possible about their ancestors. Their contribution is immense because in the facts they reveal and the stories they tell they make sure that collective and individual histories are preserved and remain to be celebrated and learned from by generations to come.

From Commonwealth War Graves Commission records I learned the names of John Jones’s parents, taking my research back a generation. I learned that his name, along with the 21 other crew members who lost their lives that day, is inscribed on the Tower Hill Memorial, which commemorates more than 50,000 merchant seamen who died in two world wars.

Much of the Navy and Army history upon which I drew came from the National Archives, for which I am a non-executive board member. Its professionalism and skill in keeping a public record of more than 1,000 years safe and accessible is world-leading. Nowadays, access to records is no longer limited to those who can get to Kew. It is open to all online through a system called Discovery, on which 32 million records—9 million of them downloadable—are available. Many millions more are available through the National Archives partnership with commercial organisations such as Ancestry and Find My Past. To commemorate this anniversary, the National Archives will be displaying the treaty of Versailles and the Armistice agreement in the Keeper’s Gallery.

The UK National Maritime Museum, the British Newspaper Archive and the Imperial War Museum all provide wonderfully rich seams of information, as do the archives of companies such as Tate & Lyle and charities such as Barnardo’s. Local authority archives are a wonderful source of information which should be treasured. I am very nervous that the poor state of local authority finances will endanger their integrity and the access that local public record offices offer. Those of us with roots in west Yorkshire are fortunate that the archive service there is excellent and was at the forefront of digitisation. This must be preserved.

There are many small voluntary groups which work in highly specialist areas, such as the Welsh Mariners Index and the Maritime Archaeology Trust, both of which helped my research. There are also many local organisations, researchers and writers who celebrate the rich history of their neighbourhoods. We heard that so powerfully from the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, when she described what happened in Lewes. David Raw’s immaculately researched book Bradford Pals is such a powerful evocation of my great-grandfather’s experience. David Raw reminds us that of the first 100 pals to enlist, 39 were killed and 19, like my great-grandfather, were sufficiently seriously wounded to be permanently discharged. There is also the work of local war memorial trusts, which care for the monuments themselves but also transcribe them and research the people on them.

This is a powerful coming together of government, private sector and civil society activity which is transforming the discipline of local and family history. They have all contributed so much to this four-year celebration. They have helped us to understand and know these brave forebears of ours, these ordinary people who did extraordinary things, and in knowing them better, we can honour them more.

Social Media: News

Baroness Scott of Needham Market Excerpts

Thursday 11th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Scott of Needham Market (LD)]

Until the last decade, media platforms were pretty much locked into a one-size-fits-all broadcast model. Success with advertisers depended on producing content that would appeal to the widest possible audience. The recent development of tablet and smartphone technology has been the game-changer, creating a delivery system available pretty much everywhere, 24 hours a day, along with highly personalised and segmented channels.

We are in a wonderful new world of information, education and communication but, as we have heard, there are also serious downsides that we have to address. In a powerful article in this month’s Washington Monthly an early investor in Facebook, Roger McNamee, describes how the algorithms created by Facebook analyse your responses to what you see and then give you more of the same. He argues that negative and hostile messages provoke the strongest responses and demonstrates how these have been used in the referendum campaign here, as well as in the French, German and US elections. Tristan Harris, formerly of Google, has talked about the public health threat from social networks such as Facebook. He calls it “brain hacking”.

We are legislators and we like to legislate: if you have a hammer, all problems tend to look like nails. Widespread, piecemeal legislative change is not the whole answer here. We need to ensure that our education system builds in an awareness of issues such as privacy and safety online, harassment and bullying, as well as critical analysis of the news. The major platforms must do more to create fake news warnings. Education about how data is used could create more pressure from users for transparency about how their data is used. I do not think most users of social media recognise that they are not customers; they are the product. The terms on which users engage—the permissions—should be rebalanced in their favour. Ideally data should belong to the users, not the platforms, and its use should certainly be time-limited.

There are some signs that things are beginning to change. An article in this week’s Politico notes that,

“a growing number of internet users are turning to new applications and tools that prevent companies and governments from building up a profile of them”.

This is in its infancy and mostly in the business sector but I believe that more will emerge. Education needs to extend beyond school and should definitely include legislators. We—I include myself in this—are not sufficiently well equipped to make judgments in this area. In New York, a city council member called James Vacca promoted a Bill to provide greater transparency of the algorithms now used to determine how public services are allocated. He has recognised that transparency in this area is a key to modern political accountability.

There is also the issue of net neutrality, currently provided for by the EU regulation on open internet access. This means that ISPs cannot block or slow down data for competitive or commercial purposes. Post Brexit, we need to ensure that companies selling content and services are not able to reduce consumer choice by abusing that position.

To end on a positive note, Reuters business news carried a story on Tuesday about how some investors in high tech are becoming increasingly concerned about the addictive aspect of their activities and their impact on children. They are changing their investment patterns accordingly. Pressure on institutional investors to pressurise the digital giants could have a significant impact. That would be especially true for the huge public sector pensions around the world.

As I left to come over for this debate, I received an invitation from the Westminster Abbey Institute to a talk about truth in politics and the ethics of negative political messaging in social media. Perhaps we should all go.